An average movie

To be honest, I wasn’t really interested in this movie but since it had been added in the ‘1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die’ list, I thought I might as well check it out. At first, the whole thing seemed to be a rather misguided passion project of Hugh Jackman (it took the guy apparently about 10 years to get this movie made) but, surprisingly, it turned out to be a success at the box-office which was something really unexpected from an original musical like this one. Well, it took me a while to get into this flick and, during the first scenes, I was pretty sure it wouldn’t work for me since I’m not a huge fan of such musicals. And, yet, I have to admit that it slowly won me over. Indeed, Hugh Jackman was basically born to play this part and some of the tunes were pretty catchy and managed to enhance a story which was obviously pretty basic. However, if Zac Efron and Zendaya made for a really charismatic couple, this sub-plot didn’t really work though. In fact, why did they put some focus on this character? I mean, the guy didn’t have such a huge impact on Barnum’s career after all and it seemed rather odd that his only ‘regular’ employee should get more attention while all the ‘freaks’ working for him were barely developed at all. Anyway, to conclude, even if it was nothing really ground-breaking, it was still a decent watch and it is worth a look, especially if you really like the genre.